The second stage of the Canadian Championship got underway Tuesday, as the three MLS teams got into the fray. The first legs provided plenty of talking points:

Up 3-1 after the first leg of their Amway Canadian Championship preliminary round tie against the Ottawa Fury, FC Edmonton’s players had a bit of a surprise prepared. Instead of bunkering and trying to protect the three road goals they scored in the first leg, they came out onto the Clarke Stadium turf looking to break the backs of their …

So, when you recall Tuesday night’s epic CONCACAF Champions League semifinal second-leg match between the Montreal Impact and Alajuelense — a nail-biter of a game in Costa Rica that saw the Impact “lose” 4-2 but hang on for a 4-4 aggregate score, with the edge being away goals — you should also stop and think back 11 months.

Well, the only thing to do is crunch the numbers; to sift through all of the matches in 2014 — both MLS and NASL — and isolate all the games where a Canadian referee has watched over a meeting between a Canadian-based side and an American-based side.

It’s the team nobody wants. The team that’s the black sheep of its league. The team that’s the black sheep of its home and native land. And that’s how FCE should sell itself to Edmonton. That’s it’s a club that has to overcome its own history of cursed luck and circumstance; it could be a unique selling point.

“He (Mallan) had his hands behind his back and the ball’s gone off the label on his jersey. That’s never a penalty. The funny thing is, I thought Drew was having a good game up to that point. But there was also six minutes of time added on. As soon as the six minutes went up, you go the feeling that something was up.”

“You get punished in this league for a mistake and we certainly did,” Brovsky declared. “It’s not one guy on the team, it’s the collective 11. We lost it ourselves. We beat ourselves. It’s something we can learn from and we’re not going to do it again.”